6. Mrs Dodds asked the Minister of Health when will he bring forward plans for transformation of the health service. (AQO 560/22-27)

I thank the Member for her question. The reform of our Health and Social Care service is one of my key concerns. I made it clear in my opening statement last Monday that it was an area that I would be focusing on along with health inequalities, cancer, mental health and waiting lists. There is an existing overarching plan for reforming our health service: the 'Health and Wellbeing 2026: Delivering Together' report. That was launched in 2016 as the Department's 10-year plan in response to the recommendations of the Bengoa report, 'Systems, Not Structures: Changing Health and Social Care'. Of course, we need to continue to review and refine that 10-year Delivering Together plan.

Progress has been made across a broad range of critical areas, including social care, mental health, acute care, elective care and primary care. For example, in primary care, we have rolled out the multidisciplinary team model, which is not only providing a better service for patients but helping to stabilise GP practices. In elective care, we have established day procedure centres at the Lagan Valley and Omagh hospitals and overnight stay centres at the Mater Hospital, Daisy Hill Hospital and the South West Acute Hospital. That is beginning to deliver some welcome results: the latest inpatient and day case stats show a reduction for the seventh successive quarter, which is the longest sustained reduction since at least 2008. I offer that as a fact, not to show complacency.

There are important examples of reform in action. Reform continues to be progressed through co-production and collaborative working with a wide range of stakeholders. My Department has published a number of Delivering Together update reports, highlighting the progress that has been made on various reform projects. The Delivering Together 2024 progress report, which summaries all the current Health and Social Care reform strategies and plans, will shortly be available for publication.

It is unfortunate that, at a time when we know that the health service needs significant reform in order to provide better outcomes for patients, we have had a history of what has happened since 2016 from the Minister. There are many points from your answer, Minister, that I could pick up on, but I will I will pick up on one: multidisciplinary teams were set up —

Question, please.

— initially as a consequence of money from the DUP confidence-and-supply agreement. So far, only 30% —

May we have a question, please, Mrs Dodds?

— of GP practices have them, and only 8% have full multidisciplinary services. When will you rectify that, and do you acknowledge that doing so is fundamental to transformation?

The irony is not lost on me that the Member criticises me for giving a history of events in 2016 but then gives the House a history of her party's confidence-and-supply arrangements.

I repeat that the multidisciplinary teams are, on an evidence base, working well and delivering what I want. Everything that I focus on is for better outcomes, which the MDTs are delivering. The roll-out was a multi-year plan. Unfortunately, under the current Budget, that plan will not be speeded up but will slow down.

I look forward to meeting Executive colleagues to try to impress on them some of the issues that are related to the current Department of Health budget and seeing what we can do. I want to do what I can with the money that we have. It is a lot of money, but the pressures remain. One of the pressures is the inability to deliver the roll-out of multidisciplinary teams in as timely a manner as I would wish.

The previous Minister gave assurances that every inch of the hospitals and buildings that we have is needed. Minister, can you give us assurances that you will bring staff and the community with you when you look at where services will be delivered? We need all the hospitals, but we also need to know where the services will be.

I agree wholeheartedly with the Member. As my predecessor said, we need every square metre, or was it square inch? I am not sure whether he was being European, but we need every "amount" that we have in those buildings. What I want to do, however, is put a focus on the people who populate them. As I said last Monday, the two primary reasons that we have a health service are to keep the healthy healthy and to cure the sick. No matter how much resource we have to keep people healthy, we will find that people become sick and will still need to go to places where they will find specialists who are dedicated to curing whatever ailment they present with.

Yes, we will look at our entire estate of hospitals. I hope, sooner rather than later, to speak to the House about how we better view each hospital as part of a network rather than as an institution operating in isolation. Not every hospital will provide every service. Again, as I said last Monday, if I were to need a procedure and the choice was between going to the nearest facility, where the procedure is done, say, once a week, and travelling a bit further to somewhere where it is done seven times a day, five days a week, I know which one I would choose. It is a question of reorganising and reforming; it is not a question of saying, "I am closing a hospital". I have no intention, over the next three years, of going anywhere near the idea of closing a hospital or reducing that square metreage or square yardage.

The Minister mentioned his commitment to the Bengoa report. We all know that, were it not for the repeated shutdowns of this place, we would be eight years into a 10-year programme of reform of the health service. Will the Minister outline his priorities for transformation over the remainder of the mandate?

I thank the Deputy Chair of the Committee for his question. What we perhaps need, given that we are so far away from the publication of the Bengoa report, is to get back to day zero and reboot. We should almost return to factory settings, to use that cliché. I have been discussing with senior officials in the Department how we might reboot. It seems to me that Bengoa has perhaps been misinterpreted in part of the public consciousness and is now viewed as some sort of road map or blueprint for how we get from where we are to the best 21st-century health and social care service that we can devise. Of course, it was not that; it was a set of principles. We could, perhaps, call it a "framework". It is up to us and to stakeholders to populate that framework and make it work in the best possible way.

I am thinking about it, and I hope to be able to return to the House, if not before recess, certainly early in the autumn, with an idea of how we go about rebooting Bengoa and actually delivering it in a practical sense and delivering the principles in a real-time sense.

Time has lapsed for listed questions. We now move to topical questions.